Salt vs Terraform: What are the differences?

Salt and Terraform are both popular infrastructure management tools used in DevOps and cloud computing. Let's explore the key differences between them.

1. Language and Approach: Salt is mainly written in Python and uses an imperative/procedural approach, allowing for more flexibility and fine-grained control over configuration management. On the other hand, Terraform is written in Go and follows a declarative approach, enabling infrastructure provisioning and management through reusable modules and resources.

2. Focus and Scope: Salt is primarily designed for configuration management and remote execution, offering features like state management, remote command execution, and cloud orchestration. It provides more comprehensive capabilities for managing system configurations and automating system administration tasks. Whereas, Terraform is focused on infrastructure provisioning and orchestration, allowing users to define, provision, and manage cloud resources and infrastructure as code across multiple cloud platforms and providers.

3. Configuration Language: Salt uses a YAML-based configuration language known as Salt State files, making it easy to define and manage system state and configurations. It provides a simple syntax and powerful expressions for managing various aspects of systems. In contrast, Terraform uses its own configuration language called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) or JSON, which is tailor-made for infrastructure provisioning and modeling cloud resources. HCL is designed to be human-readable and allows users to define resources, providers, and variables in a concise and structured manner.

4. Supported Platforms: Salt supports a wide range of operating systems and platforms, including Linux, Windows, macOS, and various cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It offers a high degree of interoperability and can integrate with existing infrastructure easily. Terraform, on the other hand, provides support for numerous cloud providers like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, as well as other services like DNS, databases, networking, and more. It caters to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud scenarios with its versatile and extensible provider ecosystem.

5. Ecosystem and Community: Both Salt and Terraform have thriving communities and ecosystems that provide extensive support, documentation, and modules. SaltStack, the organization behind Salt, provides a rich set of modules, extensions, and community-contributed formulas to enable easier system management and automation. Terraform benefits from the strong HashiCorp ecosystem, including other tools like Vault, Consul, and Nomad. It also has a large community-driven registry of Terraform modules and providers for popular cloud platforms and services.

In summary, Salt offers more flexibility and fine-grained control for configuration management and system administration, while Terraform focuses on infrastructure provisioning and orchestration across multi-cloud environments. Both tools have robust ecosystems and communities that provide support and extensibility options.